Official and Confidential (11 page)

Washington folklore had it that Edgar's drivers had to keep the car engine running when they waited for him, even if it meant waiting for hours, so that he was never delayed for an instant. Harold Tyler, an Assistant Attorney General during the Eisenhower administration, discovered this story was true. ‘Hoover came to our house one night,' he recalled.
‘I thought he'd only stay a short while, but he stayed on and on. I went out for a moment to check on booze or something and I found his driver standing there. He looked very embarrassed and said “I've run out of gas.” He'd just been afraid to switch off the engine. Hoover just felt he could get away with these things …'

One morning in 1946, on the way to work, Edgar was to hand Crawford an official letter – notification that suddenly, after thirteen years, he was being promoted to the rank of Special Agent. Noisette was promoted, too, but both went back to their servants' duties once they had attended the agents' training program. They were not real agents, just players in one of Edgar's propaganda games. Leo McClairen, who did become a star agent on the Miami Fugitive Squad, was an exception. He resumed his chauffeur role, however, whenever Edgar visited Miami.

The elevation of a few blacks was merely a plot to placate the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had publicly accused the FBI of having a ‘lily-white' hiring policy. The Bureau remained a white preserve until the sixties. Jack Levine, the Jewish agent who went through his training in 1961, was appalled to hear instructors refer openly to blacks as ‘niggers.' One told recruits that the NAACP was a Communist front. A first-aid lecturer said that, while the most effective resuscitation method was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, an alternative system could be used if the victim was black.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy made a sport of nagging Edgar about the need to hire more blacks. He raised the subject again and again, often summoning Edgar back as he was leaving the room to ask, as if it were an afterthought, ‘Oh, by the way, Edgar, how many blacks have you hired
this
month?' The Bureau's whites-only policy was under serious pressure for the first time.

A handful of blacks suddenly found themselves being asked to join the FBI. Aubrey Lewis, a former Notre Dame
football star turned coach, found himself seated next to a high-ranking Bureau official at a Hall of Fame dinner attended by President Kennedy. He was recruited soon after, and in June 1962 – along with former Bureau clerk James Barrow – became one of the first two blacks to be admitted to the FBI Academy in Virginia. Both men were soon featured in a carefully orchestrated article in
Ebony
magazine. The Bureau boasted thirteen blacks by the end of that year, out of a total agent force of 6,000 men.

Edgar remained obdurate to the end. ‘I have not, and will not, relax the high standards which the FBI has traditionally demanded,' he blustered once the Kennedys were gone. ‘Robert Kennedy became very angry with me over this. I would not yield.' Edgar and some of his aides claimed there were not enough black applicants good enough to make the grade. Black graduates who were, they said, preferred to take better-paid jobs elsewhere.

Edgar died leaving the Bureau with just seventy black agents, not one of them in a senior post. By 1991 the number had risen to 500, though this was still only 4.8 percent of the total agent force of 10,360. Ugly stories of discrimination against serving black agents continue to surface today.

The sort of agent Edgar did want, veteran agent Arthur Murtagh told a congressional committee in 1978, was ‘a good white Anglo-Saxon, preferably an Irishman with conservative views … another good WASP, and have him apply to the Bureau and see he gets the job – to hell with the qualification…'

Some applicants were rejected just because their faces looked wrong. ‘Didn't you notice that he has eyes like Robert Mitchum?' an Agent in Charge once asked Murtagh during the screening of a former Air Force Captain. ‘His eyelids fall down over his eyes. I'd be afraid to recommend him. I got transferred one time for recommending somebody that had acne on his face.'

The way a man
thought
was most important of all. ‘We're not interested,' Edgar claimed, ‘in a man's politics.' Not true. The Bureau simply passed over applicants whose earliest interviews indicated liberal ideas, or any deviation from Edgar's concept of the norm. According to former Agent Jack Levine, recruits were ‘heavily indoctrinated in radical right-wing propaganda.' Liberals who slipped through the net were moved sideways, if not out, once their deviations were spotted.

Political control extended even to the FBI dress code, which forbade the wearing of red neckties. Agents ended up politically neutered at best, at worst as right-wing zealots. ‘Mr Hoover,' said Agent Murtagh, ‘was able over a period of nearly fifty years to bring in thousands of carefully selected agent personnel who were as politically disposed to the right as he was … The result, because of the way he used those agents, was an unbalanced, damaging influence on American culture.'

A few brave agents started speaking out against Edgar's policies soon after he became Director. In 1927 Senator Thomas Walsh, a known critic of the Bureau, received an acid memorandum from a former Agent in Charge, Franklin Dodge. He told of unfair treatment of staff, the twisting of facts to give the Bureau credit that really belonged to the police, illegal pursuit of radicals and improper collaboration with right-wing journalists. Edgar himself, Dodge claimed, had been ‘junketing around the country' with his ‘wet nurse' friend Frank Baughman, spending taxpayers' money on personal pleasure trips.

Two years later another former Agent in Charge, Joseph Bayliss, sent a detailed complaint to the Attorney General. He spoke of an agency in which bureaucratic perfection was more important than investigation of crime, of a punishment system that terrorized men and destroyed individual initiative. He accused Edgar, accurately, of giving jobs to his former law school classmates, and of making appointments
‘to please certain politically influential persons … U.S. senators.' Bayliss thought his complaint would be ignored – and it was.

Michael Fooner, a member of the Bureau's Technical Section in the thirties, made the mistake of supporting the formation of an FBI branch of the Federation of Government Employees. Forty years later, when he obtained his file under the Freedom of Information Act, he was astonished to discover it was six inches thick. The Bureau had watched him throughout his subsequent career, occasionally letting other government agencies know that he was a subversive character.

‘Fear,' one agent would complain, ‘actuates every move made by the employees …'

In 1929, however, as Edgar marked his thirty-fourth birthday, real success still eluded him. His revamped Bureau might be clean as a whistle, but it was rather obscure. So was Edgar. In an article about a half-dozen Washington officials who all happened to be called Hoover, he was listed last – two below his elder brother Dickerson, by this time an important official at the Department of Commerce.

These were doldrum days in Washington. After the years of drift under Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover was beginning the third consecutive Republican reign at the White House. Within months, this businessman president would fail to realize the gravity of the Wall Street Crash, and would announce the Depression ‘over' when the real misery was yet to come.

By 1932 more than 13 million Americans, a quarter of the work force, were unemployed. Thousands of men and women stood in soup lines. A million and more were homeless. President Hoover's very name had become synonymous with economic blight. There were Hoover blankets, the newspapers used by the destitute to ward off the cold;
Hoover flags, pockets empty of money; and Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless.

Edgar allowed the Bureau to be used – entirely improperly – to silence one of the President's persistent critics. He sent no fewer than five agents to interrogate the publisher of the
Wall Street Forecast
, George Menhinick, who had been printing articles on the dire state of the nation's banks. ‘Menhinick,' Edgar reported with satisfaction, ‘was considerably upset over the visit of the agents … He is thoroughly scared, and I do not believe that he will resume the dissemination of any information concerning the banks.'

Then, on a March night in 1932, the disappearance of a baby from a nursery in New Jersey brought a much needed diversion for the President and a first taste of fame for Edgar. The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's son, and the subsequent discovery of his body, caused an explosion of publicity. In a time of gloom, the aviation pioneer was a symbol of all that was positive about America. The President sent Edgar to the scene of the crime as his personal representative.

The case did not go well. In spite of publicity touting Edgar as a ‘world authority on crime,' his involvement brought no magical breakthrough. Scornful of the Sherlock from Washington, local police told how, spotting a pigeon perched on the eaves of the Lindbergh residence, Edgar wondered aloud whether it was a homing pigeon bearing a message from the kidnappers.

One agent on the case, John Trimble, recalled being ‘stationed at a hotel in Trenton … solely for the purpose of relaying any news break to Mr Hoover so he could get it to the press …' Edgar, Trimble thought, was just ‘using the case for publicity purposes.'

One of the shrewdest minds on the investigation was that of Elmer Irey, head of the Internal Revenue Service's intelligence unit. It was he who saw to it that part of the ransom money was paid in identifiable notes and certificates, the
measure that eventually led to the capture of alleged murderer Richard Hauptmann. Yet Edgar tried to have Irey removed from the case, upsetting Charles Lindbergh in the process.

According to Trimble, Edgar placed Irey and one of his aides under Bureau surveillance. It was the start of a long enmity. Five years later, long after the case was resolved, Irey would still be having his phone checked for signs of Bureau wiretapping.

In early summer 1932, with the economy in a shambles, the Democrats scented victory in the coming presidential election. As they gathered for the Convention in Chicago, one man of influence was nursing a bitter grudge against Edgar. Mitchell Palmer, the former Attorney General who a decade earlier had given Edgar a vital break in the days of the Red Raids, believed his young protégé had betrayed him. Edgar, Palmer believed, was one of those who spread word that he was personally corrupt. Now chairman of the Democratic Platform Committee, he urged that, should the party return to power, Edgar be fired.

On the promise of a ‘new deal' for the American people, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency by a landslide. In early 1933, as the inauguration approached, word spread that his Attorney General would be Thomas Walsh, a Senator who identified Edgar with both the Red Raids and later abuses. He said he intended a massive reorganization at the Justice Department, with ‘almost completely new personnel.'

Edgar rushed to ward off the danger. Newly elected politicians, arriving at Washington's Union Station, were surprised to find themselves greeted by smiling agents from the Bureau of Investigation. Mr Hoover, the agents let it be known, was ready to help in any way possible, even by locating suitable accommodation, as a gesture of his personal goodwill.

In the event, Edgar received an unexpected reprieve. Walsh died of an apparent heart attack aboard the train bearing him to Washington. Talk of firing Edgar continued, however, and his Republican friends rallied around. Herbert Hoover, the outgoing president, interceded at the last possible moment, and in extraordinary circumstances.

On the day of Roosevelt's inauguration every bank in the nation closed its doors – the final economic humiliation for the defeated administration. It was a day of national crisis. Yet, as Hoover cruised down Pennsylvania Avenue in his limousine next to the new president, he found time to put in a word for Edgar. According to a Secret Serviceman who overheard the exchange – and as confirmed years later by Herbert Hoover himself – he said he hoped there would be no change at the top in the Bureau. Edgar, he said, had an ‘excellent record.' Roosevelt said he would look into the matter.

In fact the new president had serious doubts about Edgar, and delayed his decision for months. Edgar was made to feel distinctly uneasy. Suddenly, even his expense account was being questioned. Why had he traveled first-class on a train to New York? Had Edgar used a hotel bedroom in Manhattan for official or personal purposes? The White House received an allegation that Edgar was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a congressional ally, John McCormack, hurried to rebut it.

Senator Kenneth McKellar, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, begged the new Attorney General, Homer Cummings, to dump Edgar. So did several other members of Congress. McKellar's office had been ransacked during the last months of the Hoover presidency, and he held the Bureau responsible.

Then fate intervened again – this time with the death of Wallace Foster, a former Justice Department official Cummings was considering for Edgar's job. Edgar, meanwhile, was supplying the Attorney General with derogatory
material on a key rival for the directorship, New York private investigator Val O'Farrell.

The man who championed O'Farrell for the job, Postmaster General James Farley, was allegedly surveilled by Edgar for months to come. ‘I think he got an obsession that Farley was a sort of walking symbol of his chances to keep or lose his post,' a former agent recalled. ‘Hoover threw the works at him. A tap was put on Farley's office phones. Others were put on his homes in Washington and New York …'
²

After months of intrigue, it was Roosevelt himself who decided whether Edgar was to keep his job. One of the men he listened to, significantly enough, was Francis Garvan, Edgar's superior in the days of the Red Raids. ‘Do not let them lose you that boy Hoover,' Garvan wrote the President. ‘Each day that you have relations with him or his Bureau you will find him more necessary to your comfort and assurance.' That was to prove only too true, if not in the complimentary sense Garvan intended.